

Class ;J1 
Book 



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A FEW THOUGHTS 



FOR A 



YOUNG MAN 



A LECTURE 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE BOSTON MERCANTILE LIBRARY 
ASSOCIATION, ON ITS 29TH ANNIVERSARY 



BY 



HORACE MANN 




NEW YORK 
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER 

1890 



ft 



aMMNwaoBt ■■■■!■ i" ' ' 

POST OFFICE DEP'T. 
LIBRARY. 

■I i l l " ,, '" J 



' Wes* Newton, Nov. 11th, 1849. 
Geo, S. Blanchard, Esq., 

Dear Sir, — The possibility that even one young man 
may be prompted to lead a higher and a truer life, by 
anything contained in the Lecture which you have asked 
for publication, induces me to comply with your request. 

I have retained several paragraphs, in different 
places, which, on account of the length of the Lecture, 
were omitted in the delivery. 

Be pleased to accept tie assurances of my deep interest 
in the personal ivelfare of yourself and your fellow- 
members, and in the prosperity of the noble institution 
you are so wisely cherishing. 

HORACE MANN. 



LECTURE. 



Mr. President, and Gentlemen : 

I feel a vivid and a peculiar pleasure in 
addressing the young gentlemen of this society. 
Enrolled among the members of the " Boston 
Mercantile Library Association," there are, at 
the present time, as I am informed, between 
eleven and twelve hundred clerks who belong 
to this city. If not, to-day, therefore, the most 
powerful, it is surely among the most potential 
organizations in this metropolis. Though the 
present influence of its members upon the char- 
acter and fortunes of Boston may not be great, 
yet it will be great ; nor will it require many 
years to unfold its powers. As the botanist or 
the anatomist foresees the gigantic proportions 
of the oak or the elephant, in the embryo germ 
which he dissects, so the moral seer can proph- 
esy the energy and compass of this fraternity, 
from the numbers and the capacities of the 
ingenuous youth who compose it. 

I feel a deep regard for this society, too, 
because the great majority of its members are 



1 ] HOI 0HT8 FOB \ YOl NTG M \\. 

now at the mosl intensely interesting period 
of their life. Their characters and habits are 
at thai critical point, when, in the language of 
Dr. Pal ey, they are aboul to take 44 a holding 
turn." At leasl as early as the age of twenty- 
five in the city, though perhaps at a somewhat 
later age in the country, — for a city life hastens 
the development of mind, as a hot-house does 
of plants, — a young man generally has the 
al objects of his life pretty distinctly defined 
and mapped out. Bis c of life, or the 

means bywhich its chosen objects may be pur- 
sued, remain subjeel to change. Bui at these 
. in city and in country, the Star of Bope 
which rose with existence and has been Bteadily 
ascending and brightening in it- course, like 
the star Been by the Eastern Maui, stops in mid 
heaven, and there, beneath its culminating point, 
the youthful devotee expects to find his Beth- 
lehem and his salvation. It is a time, therefore, 
when every young man is adjured, by every 
motive thai can operate upon a mortal or an 
immortal nature, to take an observation, ami to 
whether tin' star of hi- destiny i- aboul to 
reach its zenith on the meridian of Nazareth or 
of Sodom. 

There i< -till another circumstance which ex- 
cites my sensibilities most strongly, and attaches 
me mosl tenderly t.» the members of this insti- 
tution. Many of them are from the country, 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 5 

brought up under quiet roofs and in secluded 
vales, and watched over from their birth by 
parental eyes, only less sleepless than the eye 
of God. Into their hearts have daily fallen the 
grave inculcations of a father's wisdom and the 
more subtle and subduing influences of a moth-, 
er's love ; and there too, in sorrow and in joy, 
they have felt the balm and the thrill of those 
tender relations to a sister, which, through its 
affections and its forbearances, was designed 
by heaven as a preparation and a prophecy of 
that holier relation, for which one shall forsake 
father and mother and brother and sister. Torn 
from the parental stock and transplanted to a 
city, who can describe the dangers that encom- 
pass a young man during the period of his 
moral acclimation ? This suggests, indeed, the 
grand reflection with which every wise parent 
and every wise person looks upon youth : — 
However virtuous and exemplary a young man 
may have been, he is yet within peril of falling ; 
and however vicious and abandoned he may 
have been, he is yet within hope of saving. And 
what renders this crisis at once so fearful and 
so affecting, is the fact, that at the very next 
stage of life, the danger of falling will be sub- 
stantially dispelled, or the hope of recovery 
will be fast turning to despair. 

May I be permitted to add another consider- 
ation, — one of no general weight or signifi- 



(> THOUGHTS FOB a rOUNG man. 

cance, — bu1 one which my heart prompts mo to 
utter. Prom my earliest knowledge of this 
Association, I have fell the deepest interest in 
its prosperity. Though never a member of it, 
nor entitled to membership by my vocation, yet 
in several crises of its existence, I have had the 
honor of being invited to its counsels. Unable 
to bestow upon it either silver or gold, I have 
given it, freely and rejoicingly, all that I had, — 
my best counsels and efforts, — and in return, I 
have received the rich requital of its remem* 
brance and it- courtesies. 

ruder these circumstances, I hope not to 
seem presumptuous, if I venture to Bpeak to 
you, on this occasion of your anniversary, and 
in this introductory lecture of your course, with 
the affection and with the plainness of an older 
brother^ and, instead of selecting any subject 
better fitted to display the beauties of literature, 
or the wonders of science, it' I submil to you, 

A TOW THOUGHTS FOB A YbtJNG Man WHEN EN- 
TERING UPON LIFE. Some of my remarks will 

have a more special reference to the young men 
of a mercantile community. 

I begin with the postulate, that it is the law 
of our nature to desire happiness. This law is 
nut local, but universal ; not temporary, but 
eternal. It is dqI a law to be proved by ex- 
cept ion-, tor it knows no exception. The savage 
and the martyr welcome fierce pain-, not because 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 7 

they love pain ; but because they love some ex- 
pected remuneration of happiness so well, that 
they are willing to purchase it at the price of 
the pain ; — at the price of imprisonment, tor- 
ture, or death. The young desire happiness 
more keenly than any others. This desire is 
innate, spontaneous, exuberant; and nothing 
but repeated and repeated overflows of the lava 
of disappointment can burn or bury it in their 
breasts. On this law of our nature, then, we 
may stand as on an immovable foundation of 
truth. Whatever fortune may befall our argu- 
ment, our premises are secure. The conscious 
desire of happiness is active in all men. Its 
objects are easily conceivable by all men. But, 
alas ! towards what different points of the moral 
compass do men look for these objects, and ex- 
pect to find them ! Some look for happiness 
above, and some below ; some in the grandeur 
of the soul, and some in the grossness of the 
sense ; some in the heaven of purity, and some 
in the hell of licentiousness. Wherever it is 
looked for, the imagination adorns it with all 
its glowing colors. Multitudes of those who 
seek for happiness will not obtain the object of 
their search, because they seek it amiss. De- 
ceived by false ideas of its nature, other multi- 
tudes, who obtain the object of their search, 
will find it to be sorrow and not joy, — Dead- 
Sea apples, and not celestial fruits. 



<S THOl OHTfl I \ m \ rOUNG man. 

Whether a 3 oung man 3hall reap pleasure or 
pain from winning the objects of hie choice, 
depends, n«»i only upon his wisdom or follj in 
selecting those objects, bu1 upon the right or 
wrong methods by which he pursues them. 
Hence, a knowledge what to lelect and how to 
pursue, is as necessary to the highest happiness 
as virtue herself. Virtue is an angel, but she 
is a blind one, and must ash of Knowledge to 
show her the pathway thai lend- to her goal. 
Mere knowledge, on the other hand, like a 
Swiss mercenary, is ready to combat either in 
the ranks of sin or under the banners of right- 
eousness; ready to forge cannon-balls or to 
print New Testaments; to navigate a corsair's 
«'l or a missionary's ship. 

But however energetic and vast the desires 
of happiness may be, — swelling in million- of 
hearts, growing on enjoyment , and gro\* ing -till 
more on disappointment, — nothing is more cer- 
tain than that the range and possibility of hap- 
piness, which God has provided, and placed 
within arm's length of us all, is -till vaster 
than the desire of it. in any and in all of His 
creatures. We are finite, and can receive only 
in finite quantities ; He i- infinite, and gives in 
infinite quantities. Look outwardly, and be- 
hold the variety and redundancy of means 
which the Creator ha- prepared to meet and to 

satisfy all the rational want- of Hi- children. 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 9 

So ample and multitudinous are the gifts of 
God, that He needed an immensity of space 
for their store-house ; and so various are they, 
and ascending one above another in their adap- 
tation to our capacities of enjoyment, that we 
need an eternity to sit out the banquet. If 
the human heart can ever find any rational ex- 
cuse for repining, it is not because of the penury 
and cheerlessness of its lot ; but because, as it 
mounts upward in its reach after higher enjoy- 
ments, it is compelled to leave such pure and 
exquisite pleasures untasted behind it. 

Man is not a savage or a pauper by the in- 
exorable fatality of his nature. He is sur- 
rounded with every form of the truest and 
noblest wealth ; — wealth, or well-being, for the 
body, wealth for the mind, wealth for the heart. 
He is not of plebeian origin, but his lineage is 
from God ; and when he asserts and exemplifies 
the dignity of his nature, royal and patrician 
titles shrink into nothingness, and sink to 
oblivion. Men were not created to perform 
twenty-four months of bodily labor in twelve 
months of time, while the intellectual and 
moral improvement, which a single year might 
master, is spread over a life. The laws of na- 
ture and of God doom no man to live on a 
potato a day ; but the productive powers of the 
earth are as much beyond all the demands of 
healthful sustenance, as the volume of the 



LO THOl GHT8 FOB a TO\ NTG MAN. 

atmosphere which encircles the globe is beyond 
the capacity of human lungs. Men were not 
created to live in n igwams nor in sties : but to 
rise up and to lie down in dwellings of com- 
fort and elegance. Men were not created for 
mendicity societies, and alms-houses, and the 
gallows : bul for competence, and freedom, and 
virtue : not for thoughtless puerilities and vani- 
ties, but for dignity and honor, for joy un- 
speakable and full of glory. 

Sec how the moans of sustenance and com- 
fort are distributed and diversified throughout 
the earth. There is nol a mood of body, from 
the wantonness of health to the languor of the 
death-bed, for which the wonderful alchemy 
nature dor- not proffer some luxury to stimu- 
late our pleasures ; orherpharmacy some cathol- 
icon to assuage our pains. What textures for 
clothing — from th< mer thread which the 

silk-worm weaves, to silk-like furs which the 
winds of Zembla cannot penetrate! As mate- 
rials from which to construct our dwellings, 
what Quincys and New ETampshires of granite, 
what Alleghanies of oak, and what forests of 
pine, belting the continent ! What coal-fields 
to supply the lost warmth ^\' the receding sun ! 
Nakedness and famine and pestilence arc not 
inexorable ordinance- of nature. Nudity and 
rags are only human idleness or ignorance out 
on exhibition. The cholera is hut the wrath of 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 11 

God against uncleanness and intemperance. 
Famine is only a proof of individual miscon- 
duct, or of national misgovernment. In the 
woes of Ireland, God is proclaiming the wick- 
edness of England, in tones as clear and artic- 
ulate as those in which He spoke from Sinai ; 
and it needs no Hebraist to translate the thun- 
der. And if famine needs not to be, then other 
forms of destitution and misery need not to be. 
But amid the exuberance of this country, our 
dangers spring from abundance rather than 
from scarcity. Young men, especially young 
men in our cities, walk in the midst of allure- 
ments for the appetite. Hence, health is im- 
perilled ; and so indispensable an demerit is 
health in all forms of human welfare, that who- 
ever invigorates his health has already obtained 
one of the great guaranties of mental superi- 
ority, of usefulness, and of virtue. Health, 
strength, and longevity, depend upon immuta- 
ble laws. There is no chance about them. 
There is no arbitrary interference of higher 
powers with them. Primarily our parents, 
I and secondarily ourselves, are responsible for 
them. The providence of God is no more re- 
sponsible, because the virulence of disease 
rises above the power of all therapeutics, or 
because one quarter part of the human race die 
before completing the age of one year, — die 
before completing one seventieth part of the 



12 THO! OHTfl FOB \ fOUNG M \N. 

term of existence allotted to them by the 
Psalmisl : — I say the providence of God is no 
more responsible for these things, than it is for 
picking pockets or stealing bors* 

Were a young man to write down a list of 

his duties, Health should be among the first 
items in the catalogue. This is no exaggera- 
tion of its value ; for health is indispensable 
almost every form of human enjoyment ; it is 
the grand auxiliary of usefulness ; and should 
a man love the Lord his God, with all his heart 
and soul and mind and strength, he would 
have ten times more heart and Soul and mind 
and strength, to love Him with, in the vigor of 
health, than under the palsy of disease. Not 
only the amount, hut the quality of the labor 
which a man can perform, depends upon his 
healths Theworh savors of the workman. If 
the poet sickens, his verse sickens; if black, 
venous blood flows to an author's brain, it be- 
clouds hi- pages; and the devotions of a <on- 
sumptive man -cent of his disease as Lord 
Byron's obscenities smell of gin. Not only 
"lying lip-," hut a dyspeptic stomach, is an 
abomination to the Lord. At leas! in this life, 
-<> dependent i- mind upon material organiza- 
tion, — the function- and manifestations of the 
-oul upon the condition of the hody it inhab- 
its, — that the materialist hardly states practical 
results too strongly, when he affirms that 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 13 

thought and passion, wit, imagination and love, 
are only emanations from exquisitely organized 
matter, just as perfume is the effluence of flow- 
ers, or music the ethereal product of an iEolian 
harp. 

In regard to the indulgence of appetite, and 
the management of the vital organs, society is 
still in a state of barbarism ; and the young man 
who is true to his highest interests must create 
a civilization for himself. The brutish part of 
our nature governs the spiritual. Appetite is 
Nicholas the First, and the noble faculties of 
mind and heart are Hungarian captives. Were 
we to see a rich banker exchanging eagles for 
coppers by tale, or a rich merchant bartering 
silk for serge by the pound, we should deem 
them worthy of any epithet in the vocabulary 
of folly. Yet the same men buy pains whose 
prime cost is greater than the amplest fund of 
natural enjoyments. Their purveyor and mar- 
ket-man bring them home head-aches, and indi- 
gestion, and neuralgia, by hamper-fulls. Their 
butler bottles up stone, and gout, and the 
liver-complaint, falsely labelling them sherry, 
or madeira, or port, and the stultified masters 
have not wit enough to see through the cheat. 
The mass of society look with envy upon the 
epicure who, day by day, for four hours of lux- 
urious eating suffers twenty hours of sharp ach- 
ing ; who pays a full price for a hot supper, and 



1 \ Tumi QHTfl I < m S. TOl n<; M \\. 

is 90 pleased with the bargain thai he throw 
in a Bleepless and tempestuous night, as a 
gratuity. English factory children have re- 
ceived the commiseration of the world, because 
they were scourged to work eighteen hours 
out of the twenty-four ; hut there is many a 
theoretic republican who is a harsher Pharaoh 

to his Stomach than this; — who allow- it do 

more resting-time than he does his watch; 
who gives it no Sunday, no holiday, no vaca- 
tion in any sense. Our pious ancestors enacted 
a law that suicides should be buried where four 
roads meet, and that a cart -load of stones should 
be thrown upon the body. Yet, when gentle- 
men or ladies commii suicide, not by cord or 
steel, hut by turtle-soup or lobster-salad, they 
may be buried in consecrated ground, and un- 
dertime auspices of the church, and the public 
arc not ashamed to read an epitaph upon their 
tombstones false enough to make the marble 
blush. Were the barbarous old law now in 
force that punished the body of the suicide for 
t In 1 offence which his soul had committed, we 
should find many a Mount Auburn at the cross- 
roads. I- it not humiliating and amazing, that 
men, invited by the exalted pleasures of the 
intellect, and the -acred affections of the heart , 
to come to a banquet worthy of the gods, should 
stop by the way-side to feed on garbage, or to 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN, 15 

drink of the Circean cup that transforms them 
to swine ! 

If a young man, incited by selfish princi- 
ples alone, inquires how he shall make his 
appetite yield him the largest amount of grati- 
fication, the answer is, by Temperance. The 
true epicurean art consists in the adaptation oi 
our organs not only to the highest, but to the 
longest enjoyment. Vastly less depends upon 
the table to which we sit down, than upon the 
appetite which we carry to it. The palled 
epicure, who spends five dollars for his dinner, 
extracts less pleasure from his meal than many 
a hardy laborer who dines for a shilling. The 
desideratum is, not greater luxuries, but livelier 
liapillaz ; and if the devotee of appetite would 
propitiate his divinity aright, he would not send 
to the Yellowstone for buffaloes' tongues, nor 
to France ior-pati defois gixts, but would climb 
a mountain or swing an axe. With health, 
there is no end to the quantity or the variety 
from which the palate can extract its pleasures. 
Without health, no delicacy that nature or art 
produces can provoke a zest. Hence, when a 
man destroys his health, he destroys, so far 
as he is concerned, whatever of sweetness, of 
flavor and of savor, the teeming earth can pro- 
duce. To him who has poisoned his appetite 
by excesses, the luscious pulp of grape or 
peach, the nectareous juices of orange or pine- 



L6 THOUGHTS FOB a FOXING MAX. 

apple, are bul a loathing and a nausea. He 
bas turned gardens and groves of delicious fruit 
into gardens and groves of ipecac, and aloes. 
The same vicious indulgences thai blasted his 
health, blasted all orchards and cane-fields also. 
Verily, the man who is physiologically "wick- 
ed" does n<>t live oul half bis days ; nor is this 
the worst of his punishment, for he is more 
than half dead while he appears to live. 

Lei the young man, then, remember, that, for 
every offence which he commits againsl the 
laws of health, nature will bring him into judg- 
ment. However graciously God may deal with 
the heart, all our experience proves thai He 
never pardons stomach, muscles, lungs, or brain. 
These must expiate their offences i*»-vicariously. 
N*ay, there are numerous and obvious cases of 
violated physical laws, where Nature, with all 
her diligence and severity, seems unable to 
scourge the offender enough during his life-time, 
and so -lie goes on plying her scourge upon his 
children and his children's children alter him, 
even to the third and fourth generation. The 
punishmenl is entailed on posterity ; nor human 
law, nor human device, can break the entail- 
ment. And in these hereditary inflictions, 
nature abhors alike the primogeniture laws of 
England and the Salic laws of Prance. All the 

sons and all the daughters are made inherits 

not in aliquot parts; hut, by a kind ofmalig- 



THOUGHTS FOK A YOUNG MAN. 17 

nant multiplication in the distemper, each in- 
herits the whole. 

I ask the young man, then, who is just form- 
ing his habits of life, or just beginning to indulge 
those habitual trains of thought out of which 
habits grow, to look around him, and mark 
the examples whose fortune he would covet, or 
whose fate he would abhor. Even as we walk 
the streets, we meet with exhibitions of each ex- 
treme. Here, behold a patriarch, whose stock 
of vigor three-score years and ten seem hardly 
to have impaired. His erect form, his firm step, 
his elastic limbs, and undimmed senses, are so 
many certificates of good conduct ; or, rather, 
so many jewels and orders of nobility with 
which nature has honored him for his fidelity 
to her laws. His fair complexion shows that 
his blood has never been corrupted ; his pure 
breath, that he has never yielded his digestive 
apparatus for a vintner's cess-pool ; his exact 
language and keen apprehension, that his bram 
has never been drugged or stupefied by the 
poisons of distiller or tobacconist. Enjoying 
his appetites to the highest, he has preserved 
the power of enjoying them . Despite the moral 
of the school-boy's story, he has eaten his cake 
and still kept it. As he drains the cup of life, 
there are no lees at the bottom, His organs 
will reach the goal of existence together Pain- 
lessly as a candle burns down In its socket, so 



18 r< 11 I HT8 FOB A rOUKG M \N. 

will be expire; and a little imagination would 
convert him into another Enoch, t ranslated from 
earth to a better world without the sting of 

death. 

I > 1 1 1 look a1 an opposite extreme, where an 

opposite history IS recorded. What wreck BCj 

shocking to behold asthe wreck of a dissolute 
man ; — the vigor of life exhausted, and yet the 
first steps in an honorable career not taken ; in 
himself a lazar-house of diseases; dead, hut by 
a heathenish custom of society, not buried ! 
Rogues have had the initial letter of their title 
burnt into the palm- of their hands; even for 
murder, Cain was only branded on the tore- 
head: hut over the whole person of the debau- 
chee or the inebriate, the signatures of infamy 
air written. How nature brand- him with 
stigma and opprobrium! Mow she hangs la- 
bels all over him, to testify her disgust at his 
existence, and to admonish others to beware of 
his example ! Bow she loo-en- all his joint-, 
-end- tremors along his muscles, and bends 
forward hi- frame, ;i- it' to bring him upon all- 
fours with kindred brutes, or to degrade him 
to the reptile's crawling! How -lie disfigures 
hi- countenance, a- if intent upon obliterating 
all trace- of her own image, SO that she may 

swear she never made him! How she pours 
rheum over his eyes, sends foul spirits to in- 
habit his breath, and shrieks, as with a tram- 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 19 

pet, from every pore of his body, " Behold a 
Beast ! " Such a man may be seen in the 
streets of our cities every day ; if rich enough. 
he may be found in the saloons, and at the 
tables of the "Upper Ten;" but surely, to 
every man of purity and honor, to every man 
whose wisdom as well as whose heart is un- 
blemished, the wretch who comes cropped and 
bleeding from the pillory, and redolent with 
its appropriate perfumes, would be a guest or 
a companion far less offensive and disgusting. 

Now let the young man, rejoicing in his 
manly proportions, and in his comeliness, look 
on this picture, and on this, and then say, 
after the likeness of which model he intends 
his own erect stature and sublime countenance 
shall be configured. 

Society is infinitely too tolerant of the rou6, 
— the wretch whose life-long pleasure it has 
been to debase himself and to debauch others ; 
whose heart has been spotted with infamy so 
much, that it is no longer spotted, but hell- 
black all over; and who, at least, deserves to 
be treated as travellers say the wild horses of 
the prairies treat a vicious fellow, — the noblest 
of the herd forming a compact circle around 
him, heads outward, and kicking him to death. 

But why should not a young man indulge 
an ambition to lay up a stock of health, as well 
as to lay up stocks of any other kind ? Health 



20 THOl GHTfl FOB I TOl SO MAN. 

ia earned, — as literally bo as any commodity 
in the market. Health can be accumulated, in- 
vested, made to yield it- interest and it- com- 
pound interest, and thus be doubled and re- 
doubled. The capita] of health, indeed, may 
all be forfeited by one physical misdemeanor, 
as a rich man may sink all hi- property in one 
bad -peculation: but it is as capable of being 
increased as any other kind of capital ; and it 

can be safely insured on payment of the reason- 
able premium of temperance and forethought. 
This, too. is a species of wealth, which i- not 
only capable of a life-long enjoyment by its 
possessor, but it may be transmitted to chil- 
dren by a will and testament that no human 
judicature can set aside. 

Why, too, should not a young man be ambi- 
tious to amass a capital of health upon which 
lie can draw, in cases of emergency, without 
danger of bankruptcy, or even of protest ? 
Suppose, in the course of lite, some brilliant 
achievement should be offered for hi- winning, 
some literary or scientific labor, or some vic- 
tory over the leagued force- of vice, or error, 
or ignorance, — which might demand for it- 
triumph a double amount of exertion, for 

month-, or for years; — then, when he feel- 
that he can do a day's work every day, and 
another day's work every night, and still live 
as Ion-- and enjoy a- much as his fellows, will 



THOUGHTS FOlt A YOUNG MAN. 21 

he not experience a delight in the conscious- 
ness of his power, a thousand times more vivid 
and more pure than a capitalist can ever feel 
over his funds, or a miser* over his hoards? 
And is not this a legitimate satisfaction ; nay, 
a lofty and honorable ambition, to which a 
true man may properly aspire ? 

There is one error, in regard to health, so 
common in all ranks of life, that special pains 
should be taken to prevent young men from 
incurring its mischiefs. Almost every man 
has his own pet indulgence. This he defends 
by saying that, however injurious it may be to 
others, it is harmless to himself; and he re- 
fers to his past experience to justify his future 
indulgence ;— affirming that he has tried it for 
years, he knows it has been innoxious, and he 
will, therefore, persist. 

Now, this reasoning, in ninety-nine cases in 
a hundred, is the shallowest of fallacies. In 
the first place, a man can never know how well 
he would have been, but for the indulgence he 
defends. He wants, and must necesssarily 
want, as an object of comparison, and as a 
ground for his inference, that other self, which, 
but for the indulgence, he would have been. 
In the next place, and principally, every well- 
constituted person is endowed with a vast fund 
of health and strength, at his birth ; and if this 
has not been impaired by the ignorance or 



l'l' i n< »i GH1 - n >H I rOUNQ M w. 

folly of his natural guardians, he brings il with 

■ 

hi in upon the stage of life. This fund of 
natural, inborn health and vigor may be in- 

iscd, or kept at par, or squandered. The 
case may l>e likened to b deposit, in bank, of 
a hundred thousand dollar-, for a young man's 
benefit. He may make a draft upon it of five 
thousand dollars a year, and may repeal his 
draft annually, for twenty years 5 and because 
the draft is always answered, the drawer may 
say, "I know that this expenditure does not 
impair my fortune: my credit continue- 

>d as ever, and the last time my check was 
presented, it was promptly honored." True. 
But the self-same act now cited to prove the 
exhaustlessness of the fund is the very act that 
drew the last cent of the deposit, and balanced 
the account. It is false logic, when the in- 
ference uses up the premises, and the syllo- 
gism seems to stand stronger until it stands on 
nothing. Yet such is the argument in defence 
of every indulgence and every exposure that 
militates against the laws of health. He who 
draws upon a supply that i- not infinite will 
sooner or later reach the bottom. Let this be 
received a- an axiom, that no law o\' health, 
any more than a law of conscience, can ever 
be broken with impunity. To affirm that any 
violation of a law of health will not be followed 
by it- corresponding injury, i- ;i- philosophi- 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 23 

cally absurd as to say there may be a cause 
which produces no effect. 

A young man, in the city, and, in some avo- 
cations, in the country also, who has only a 
limited stipend for the supply of all his wants, 
is sorely tempted to indulge himself in what 
meets the public eye, and to scrimp himself in 
needs of a more private character. An un- 
healthful sleeping-room may be endured, that 
a showy dress may be displayed. A month of 
penurious living is the penality of an expen- 
sive entertainment. A day of indiscreet and 
perhaps baneful pleasure absorbs what would 
have sufficed to spread comfort over weeks. 
In former days, under the despotism of a cus- 
tom as cruel as it was ridiculous, a young man, 
with a few spare dollars in his pocket, was ex- 
pected to spend them in the sensual pleasures 
of a wine-bibbing entertainment, instead of 
spending them for the godlike joy of succoring 
distress, of reclaiming from guilt, or of rescu- 
ing innocence from perdition. * 

*I once knew a young man, who, on removing from the country to 
the city, was introduced to a very respectable circle of persons about 
his own age, who were in the habit of meeting periodically, for the 
nominal purpose, at least, of conversation and social improvement. 
But any looker-on at their symposia might not have been deemed un- 
charitable, had he supposed that the supper, the wine, and the cigars, 
constituted the principal attraction. He became one of their number, 
and for a time enjoyed the hilarity and shared the expense of the en- 
tertainments; but being at last rebuked by his conscience for this mode 
of spending both time and money, he quietly withdrew from the club, 
though without abandoning his intimacy with its members. Through 
one of their number, he learned the average cost of their suppers, and 



1^ it no1 one of the mos1 unaccountable of 
contradictions, thai the public should look back- 
wards upon examples of frugality, and wisely 
apportioned expenditure, with feelings so dif- 
ferent from those with which it regards the 
same virtues, when exhibited before it- own 
eyes? Who does nol feel honored by bis re- 
lationship to Dr. Franklin, whetherasa towns- 
man, or as a countryman, or even as belonging 
to the same race? Who does not feel a sort of 
persona] complacency in that frugality of his 
youth, which laid the foundation for so much 
competence and generosity in hi- mature age ; 
in that wise discrimination of his outlay-, which 
held tlu^ culture of the soul in absolute suprem- 
acy over the pleasure- of sense; and in that 

taking an equal ram from his own scantily-filled parse, he laid it aside, 
■e a fund for charity. At the end of a singl< found himself 

n of a hundred dollars, wholly made up of those rami - 
from genteel dissipation. This amount Ik- took t>> a poor but most 
emplary family, consisting of a widow and several small children, all 
of whom were struggling, as for life, and agaim 
circumstances, to maintain a show of respectability, and to provid e the 
means of attending the public school. The bestowment of thiefeum 
upon the disheartened mother and tin- fatherless children, together 
with tin- sympathy ami counsel that accompanied it, - put a 

new heart Into the bosoms <-f them all. Tt proved the turning point in 
their fortui paid, tin- - 

and a tew articles of decent clothii - obtained, tin- children 

• g forward in their studies, equalling or outstripping all oompett- 

. • Ley are all among the I 

exemplary and useful citizens im the Btate. NTow, it would 

If, not among ///>//, nut at: -k the 

question, as if doubtful of the answer, which of 1 ^ mm sx> 

lantity and the purest quality of happl 
his hundred doll h a oharity ever fail to fronoflt him 

that g Mm thai takes. 



THOUGHTS FOB A YOUNG MAN. 25 

consummate mastership of the great art of liv- 
ing, which has carried his practical wisdom 
into every cottage in Christendom, and made 
his name immortal? And yet, how few there 
are among us who would not disparage, nay, 
ridicule and contemn, a young man who should 
follow Franklin's example ! Is not this the 
strangest of weaknesses, as well as of inconsist- 
encies ; for, when we take to ourselves credit 
for commending a virtue, why should we dis- 
dain to practice it ? Do you ask me why there 
will be no old Benjamin Franklins in the coming 
generation of adults ? I answer, only because 
there are no young Benjamin Franklins in the 
present generation of youth ; — none who will 
feed his body on a roll of bread, that divine 
philosophy may regale his soul. 

Do I need an apology for dwelling thus long 
and earnestly, not only on the economical bene- 
fits, but on the moral and religious obligation, 
of taking care of health? I find one in the 
facts, that ethical and theological writers, al- 
most if not quite without an exception, have 
left this field out of the domain of conscience ; 
and that the constituted guardians and direc- 
tors of youth, — those at the head of our col- 
leges and higher seminaries of learning, — have 
so generally omitted it in their counsels of wis- 
dom. Let no young man attempt to palliate 
a continued neglect of this high duty, by say- 



26 rHOi 0HT8 fob \ roi m m \\. 

ing thai an imperfed education has lefll him 
without the requisite knowledge. There are 
books and drawings and anatomical prepara- 
tions, where this knowledge may be found. 
Do you say you have not money to buy them? 
Then, I reply, -weep -nee!-, or sweep chim- 
neys, to earn it ! 

Having learned the condition- on which 
health can be enjoyed, and having secured its 
continuance by habit, let \\iv young man sur- 
vey the universe into which he has been born, 
and comprehend his marvellous relations to it. 

Notwithstanding the beautiful adaptations of 
the physical world to our need-, yel when we 
leave the regions of sense and of sensuous 
things, and ascend to the sphere of the intellect, 
we find that all which had ever delighted us 
before becomes poor and sombre in the presence 
of the brighter glories thai burst upon our view. 
Here fresh and illimitable fields, — as it were a 
new creation, — open upon us, and, correspond- 
ing with the new objects presented, a group of 
new faculties, to explore and enjoy them, is 
awakened within us. The outward eye S< 
out ward things, and the outside of things only ; 
l>ut the inward eye beholds the interior laws 
that govern and inform them. The natural 
eye looks upon the work- of nature only I 

letterless man looks upon a hook or a library ; 
but the inward eye is emancipated from the 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 27 

bonds that bind its brother. The great pano- 
rama of the universe limits and bounds the out- 
ward organs that behold it ; gives them all 
they can ask ; fills them with all they can re- 
ceive. Splendid and majestic as are the heav- 
ens and the earth to the natural eye, yet they 
are solid, opaque, impervious. But to the 
subtle and pervading intellect, this solid frame- 
work of the universe becomes transparent. Its 
densest and darkest textures are crystalline. 
To the intellect, each interior fibre and atom 
of things is luminous. The light of the mind 
has power to penetrate and permeate the walls 
and canopy of its earthly dwelling-place, as the 
light of the sun shines through glass. The 

© © © 

soul finds all matter a vacuum, and runs through 
it as electricity runs through iron. The spirit- 
ual essence of man, looking out through the 
material structure of the body, beholds the 
spiritual essences of things that vivify the ma- 
terial structure of creation. To the natural 
sense, the works of nature are only like some 
most exquisite piece of mechanism, confined for 
its protection in thick encasements of oak or of 
iron, and veiled from sight by the covering 
that hides while it secures it ; or like a temple 
filled with all the wonders of nature and of art, 
but all whose doors are barred and all whose 
windows blinded. You see the walls that en- 
close the machine ; you see the temple's mag- 



28 l IK HJGHTfl FOB \ T( >1 kg M w. 

nificent exterior; while to the spring which 
moves the wheels ofthe one, and to the splen- 
dors and enchantments thai (ill every compart- 
ment of the other, 3 on are Mind. But to the 
intellect of man all recesses are opened ; all 
secrets revealed. Sunlighl glows where dark- 
ness gloomed. T<> this power, no height is in- 
accessible, no depth unfathomable, do distance 
untraversable. It has the freedom of the uni- 
verse. It cannot be swallowed up in the wa- 
ter- of the sea ; it cannot be crashed by the 
weight of the earth ; and in the midst of the 
fiery furnace, one whose form is like the Son 
of ( rod walk- by it- side. 

So, too, all created things are governed by 
laws, — each by its own. The inanimate move 
and gravitate and are chemically changed from 
form to form ; the animate! live and reproduce 
their kind and die, in obedience to unchange- 
able laws. These haws the intellect of man 
can discover and understand ; and thus make 
his dominion coextensive with his knowledge. 
So far as we understand these laws, we can 
bring all substances that are governed by them 
under their act ion, and thus product 4 the re- 
sults we de-ire ; just as the coiner subjects his 
gold dust to the process of minting, and brii 
out eagles. So far as we understand the ( !rea- 
tor's laws, He Invests us with Hi- power. When 
knowledge enables me to speak with the Bam- 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 29 

in£ tongue of lightning:, across a continent, is 
it not the same as though I had power to call 
down the swiftest angel from heaven, and send 
him abroad as the messenger of my thoughts ? 
When a knowledge of astronomy and naviga- 
tion enables me to leave a port on this side 
of the globe and thread my labyrinthine way 
among contrary winds, and through the currents 
and counter-currents of the ocean, and to strike 
any port I please on the opposite side of the 
globe ; is it not the same as though God for 
this purpose had endued me with His all-seeing 
vision, and enabled me to look through clouds 
and darkness around the convex earth? Nor 
does the intellect stop with the knowledge of 
physical laws. All the natural attributes of 
the Author of those laws are its highest and 
noblest study. Its contemplations and its dis- 
coveries rise from the spirit that dwelleth in a 
beast to the spirit that dwelleth in a man ; and 
from this to the spirit that dwelleth in the hea- 
vens. Every acquisition of knowledge, also, 
which the intellect can make, assimilates the 
creature to the all-knowing Creator. It traces 
another line on the countenance of the yet ig- 
norant child, by w^hich he more nearly resem- 
bles the Omniscient Father. Do not these re- 
flections prove the worth and power and gran- 
deur of the human mind, and show the infinite 
nature of the boon and blessedness which have 



30 THOUGHTS FOB I rOUNG MAX. 

been placed within reach of every human being? 
Look, too, at tin- provision which the bounty 
of God has made for another group of the hu- 
man faculties, — for the aesthetic or beauty-lov- 
ing )»:irl of our nature We might have eaten 
and drank and worked in a drab-colored uni- 
verse as well as in this scene of ever-varying 
splendor ; in a world of monotone and droning 
as well as in the midsl of 

14 Tt n thousand harps that tune 
Angelic harmoni< 

in a world of geometric triangles and polygons, 

instead of fields of waving grain and bowers of 

wreathing vines and all the graceful line- of 
beauty and of art. Yet what a prodigality of 
creation- to gratify the sentiment of beauty in 
the mind of man! — the many-colored Bowers 
of the green earth, and the many-colored stars 

of the cerulean sky : the tint- of the living 

foliage of summer, and the more us hues 

of the dying foliage of autumn, — thai season 
when nature weaves a mantle of more than 
Tynan splendor, and spreads it like a garment 
over valley and hill ; the fervid and ever- 
changing effulgence of the rising sun, and the 

> 

gentler glories of his setting hour; the station- 
ary rainbow and the shooting aurora-: the 
glittering color- of bird and insect and -hell : 
all nature's symmetry of proportion, whether 

in the tiny wall- of the coral insect's sepulchre, 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 31 

or in the honey-bee's com!), or in the basaltic 
pillars that uphold the mountains ; the rigid 
shaft of the oak, and the vine that gracefully 
festoons it; — -but I forbear; for who shall 
catalogue the master-pieces in nature's galleries 
of beauty, — all marvels, all fashioned from 
archetypes of infinite excellence in the Divine 
Mind? Surely, He who created the fragrance 
and flowers and music of Paradise ; He who 
has commanded a thousand sleepless attendants, 
each with a horn of plenty in its hand, to stand 
around even the disobedient children of men, 
and minister to their luxury and their adorn- 
ment, was no anchorite. Surely, He who 
created all colors, and has mingled them to- 
gether in the petals of flowers, in the armature 
of insects and in the plumage of birds, and has 
blended lily and rose in the cheek of youth ; 
He who has strewed the bottom of the ocean 
with pearls, and sowed jasper and amethyst 
and chrysolite among the rocks, was no con- 
temner of adornment. He prepared this won- 
drous frame of things not only to excite the 
exultation of sense and of sentiment, but to in- 
spire the sublime contemplations of the intel- 
lect, and to make our devotions impassioned 
by making their Object so admirable. And 
with what nice adaptations and' adjustments 
man is fitted to the universe 4n which he is 
placed ! Behold the marvellous reach and 



raoi OHTfi fob a roi ffG u w. 

energy with which the narrow organs of our 
narrow bodies extend their cognizance and dis- 
play their power! The nervous filaments of 
the Benses are liner than a spider's thread. 
Vet they are the avenues of communication be- 
tween the world without and the world within. 

They spread themselves out over a little space 

at the root- of the tongue, and all the SaVOTfi 

of nature become tributaries to our pleasure. 
They unfold themselves over a little space in 
the olfactory organs, and we catch the perfumes 

of all the /one-. '11 ley are rami tied over a little 

space in the hollow of the ear, and the myriad 

Voices of nature, from the shrill in-cet or the 

mellifluous song-bird to the organ-tones of 

heaven's cathedral, — the thunder, the cataract 
and the ocean, — become our orchestra. They 
line a -pot in the interior of the eye so -mall 
that the tip of the finger may cover it ; when 
lo ! the earth and the heavens, to the remotest 
constellations thai seem to glitter feebly on the 
confines of -pace, are painted, quick as thought, 
in the chambers of the brain. By these sei 
we hold connection with all external things, a- 
though millions of telegraphic wire- were 

-t retched from every outward object, and came 
in converging line- to find their focus in our 
organs, and through these inlets to pour their 
pictures, their odors and their songs, into the 

all-CapaciOUS brain. Nay, better than this : for 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAX. 33 

we have the picture, the perfume and the music, 
without the encumbrance of the wires. 

But a higher and holier world than the world 
of Ideas, or the world of Beauty, lies around 
us ; and we find ourselves endued with suscep- 
tibilities which affiliate us to all its purity and 
its perfectness. The laws of nature are sub- 
lime, but there is a moral sublimity before 
which the highest intelligences must kneel and 
adore. The laws by which the winds blow, 
and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsy- 
dra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the 
hours of ever-flowing time ; the laws by which 
the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints ; 
the laws which preside over the subtle combi- 
nations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities 
of electricity ; the laws of germination and pro- 
duction in the vegetable and animal worlds ; — 
all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they 
are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, 
still wane and pale before the Moral Glories 
that apparel the universe in their celestial light. 
The h.eart can put on charms which no beauty 
of known things, nor imagination of the un- 
known, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines 
in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, 
or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian 
gardens in their bloom can exale no such sweet- 
ness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is god- 
like, and he who does most good to his felJow- 



34 THOUGHTS FOB \ TO1 TO M \.\. 

man is the Master of Masters, and has learned 
the Aii of Arts. Enrich and embellish the 
univerg u will, it is only a lit temple for 

the hearl thai loves truth with a supreme love. 
[nanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge 
kindles admiration, bul love enraptures the 
soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, bul moral 
truth i- divine; and whoever breathes its air 
and walk- by it- light has found the losl para- 
dise. For him a new heaven and a new earth 
have already been created. His home is the 
sanctuary of ( rod, the holy of boli 

And now, into this universe, 90 redundant in 
t reasures for the body, in grandeur for the mind, 
and in happiness for the heart, man is horn. 
He awaken- into lite, like Adam in the garden 
of Eden, and finds himself surrounded by a 
higher paradise than bloom and fruitage, than 
stream- and embowering -hade-, can create. 
lie lind- the earth a vast and perfect appara- 
tus of means adapted and designed to minister 
to hi- enjoyment and to aggrandize Id- power. 
The globe, with all it- dynamical energies, it< 
mineral treasures, it- vegetative powers, it- 
fecundities of lite, is only a grand and divinely 
wrought machine jml into his hand-: and, on 
the condition of knowledge, he may wield it 
and use it , a- an artisan uses his tool. Knowl- 
edge inaugurates us into the office of superin- 
tendent and director of the element-, and all 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 35 

their energies. By means of knowledge, they 
may all be made ministering servants for our 
profit and our pleasure. Such is the true phil- 
osophic relation in which we stand to this earth, 
to the perfect system of laws which govern it, 
and to the mighty and exhaustless energies 
with which its frame, and every organ of its 
frame, is filled. It is our automaton. Gravita- 
tion, repulsion, caloric, magnetism, air, water, 
fire, light, lightning, — through knowledge, we 
can play them all, as Maelzel plays his chess- 
men ! 

As a being of spiritual attributes, man occu- 
pies, as it were, a central point. The glow- 
ing universe spreads around him. With his 
hand, or with his thought, or with his love, he 
can lay hold on every part of it. Though born 
in ignorance, yet his intellect is like an ever- 
growing papyrus, on whose leaves all knowl- 
edge may be written. Though liable to fall, 
amidst the false lights of earth, and under the 
wild impulses of his nature, yet he can rise 
by aspiration to the " first good, first perfect, 
and first fair." The human soul is Desire; 
the works and wisdom of God are a fountain 
of Supply. If the soul of man is a void at birth, 
it is a void so capacious that the universe may 
be transfused into it. All nature and spirit 
have an affinity for the new-born child. They 
address themselves to him in sweetest accents. 



36 i hoi '.ii rs F( >i; k YOl SO M \\. 

The} yearn to pour themselves into the capa- 
cious chambers of bis mind, and the m< 
capacious chambers of his heart. They flow 
to him. they impress themselves upon him, 
the images of objects are cast upon a mirror by 
reflected sunlight. As the mirror receives im- 
- from abroad, so does he ; but , infinitely 
superior to the mirror, he can retain whal he 
receives. By labor and by duty, he can pro- 
vide mansions in his soul, capacious of all 
things. By imagination, he can reproduce all 
forms and properties of material things; by 
intelligence, he can comprehend the laws which 
govern and the springs which move them ; and 
by love and truth, lie can enter heaven, and 
hold communion with every order in the hie- 
rarchy of excellence. Thus, in every human 
soul, creation may be created anew. The un- 
conscious creation may be I consciously. 
Nay, the created universe may repent itself in 
every human soul. Born into this actual uni- 
verse, the weakest child, by virtue of hi- en- 
dowment- and capacities, is, in himself, a po- 
tential universe. Supply the condition of infi- 
nite duration, and each soul is capable of being 
built up into another universe, of height, and 
depth, and amplitude, like it- prototype. In 

the same sense in which our life i- COfival with 
eternity, our mental nature i- commensurate 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 37 

with infinity, and our moral nature capable of 
perfection. 

I say, then, that every human being is born 
into this world, a potential universe. Prospec- 
tively, he is receptive of all sentient enjoy- 
ments ; capable of all knowledge, and suscep- 
tible of all forms of virtue. Insect and worm, 
as he is at birth, there is within him the sem- 
inal principle of all grandeur and all glory. 
Conscious of but a single want and a single 
pleasure, on his introduction into life, the bless- 
ings which crowd an immensity, and lie along 
the vista of an eternity, are within his reach. 

In one respect, indeed, man holds high pre- 
eminence over the universe into which he is 
born. Ashe builds himself up, idea by idea, 
and virtue by virtue, each new acquisition in 
the infinite progression of knowledge, and each 
new ascension in the endless acclivities of duty, 
is a new joy. We were created in ignorance 
and in weakness, for the very purpose of en- 
abling us to feel the conscious delight of gath- 
ering in knowledge, and of growing stronger 
in virtue. Had we been endued, at birth, with 
any amount of positive knowledge, or had we 
been set forward, by the shortest stage, in the 
path of actual duty, it would have been so 
much subtracted from the pleasures of acqui- 
sition and of improvement. So much as we had 
known, so much of novelty should we have 



Tlh >\ 0HT8 i \ >B a rOl HQ M \N. 

lost. Addison beautifully describes the m< 

and planet - to be 

11 Forever singing as they Bhi 

• The hand that mad*' us is <H\ Ine, 

And this is true But their song is sung only 
to other cars. In the rightly developed soul, 
this is sung to its own consciousn< 

this celestial music is chanted for it- own in- 
ward car. Hence, poor and weak and igno- 
rant as we are at birth, we haw what is far 
better than any created majesty or wisdom or 
blessedness could be, — we have faculties by 
which we can ourselves cooperate in their ac- 
quisition, and thus secure a triple reward: — 
the pleasure of acquiring, the blessing acquired, 
and an increased power of compassing new 
blessings. 

Now all this vastness and splendor and dura- 
tion are the birth-right, or rather the birth-gift, 
of all. Nor have 1 we any reason to suppose that 
the bounty of the Creator is to cease it- over- 
flow here, as though Hi* fountain were exhaust- 
ed, or our urn- were full. On the contrary, 
all our ideas of our Heavenly Father prompt 
us to believe that He ha-, and will forever 

have, purer, more precious and more copious 
gifts in -tore, corresponding with our enlar< 
and exalted capacities to receive them. All 
analogy teaches us that we have undeveloped 
faculties within us, susceptibilities of happiness 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 39 

yet dormant, for whose fervor and intensity 
this world is too cold and ungenial ; and which, 
therefore, await our translation to the land of 
the blest, where a purer ether and subtler ele- 
mental tires shall kindle them into life. While 
we were yet in embryo, our body existed in 
form as perfect as at present; our muscles, 
our brain, our lungs, and all our organs of 
sense, were complete ; but we needed to be 
ushered into this world of air and light and 
motion and beauty, to call them into play. 
So in regard to the next stage of existence, we 
have the assurance of splendors and sympho- 
nies and loves, such as eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart 
of man to conceive ; and if so, then we must 
now have within us, lying undeveloped and 
inert, the rudimentary organs of eye and ear 
and heart, with which we shall see and hear 
and feel the vision, the hallelujah, and the ec- 
stasy, of the better world. As to this unseen 
and unimagined magnificence and beautitude 
of the future life, we are, while sojourning 
upon earth, only in the ante-natal state of dark- 
ness, inactivity and circumscription. Such is 
the nature which God has bestowed upon us, 
to be magnified, enlightened and adorned ; and 
it is not given to mortal Eloquence or Poesy, 
with all their many-colored words, to paint the 
number and the variegation of its glories ! 



10 i m« • GHT8 r« »i: \ ] I >r\<; ftfl w. 

But, for tin- Book of Life, there is a Book 
of Death. Balancing our keen susceptibilities 
of enjoyment, are susceptibilities of suffering 
not [ess kern. Every nerve thai can thrill with 
pleasure can also agonize with pain. Instead 
of hymnings of bliss, there may be howlings of 
despair. It' there is an infinity of truth, there 
is an infinity of error also; and the empyrean 
of possible blessedness is not more high than 

the abysses of possible WOe are dee)). We are 
horn into tree and open -pace, in a figurative 
a- well as in a literal setose. Intellectually, 
we can go backwards as well as forward-. Mor- 
ally, we can go downward- as well a- upward-. 
Our possible range of oscillation louche- the 
extremes of health and sickness; of intellect- 
ual law and of chaos anti-intellectual: of holi- 
ness and of -in. Whenever a law i- submitted 
to a free, rational being, it i- necessarily ac- 
companied by two possibilities, — the possibil- 
ity of obedience, and the possibility of dis- 
obedience; — and when the law, like all the 
Divine law-, executes itself, there is attached 

to these possibilities the certainty of infinite 
gain, or of infinite loss. Free agency ne- 
cessitates the possibility of perdition: moral 
compulsion, indeed, may save from ruin: but 
compulsion abolishes freedom. 

Endued, then, with these immortal and en- 
ergetic capacities to -our or -ink; with tl 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 41 

heights of glory above him, and this abysm of 
wretchedness below him ; whitherward shall 
a young man set his face, and how shall he 
order his steps? 

There is a time when the youthful heir of 
a throne first comes to a knowledge of his 
mighty prerogatives ; when he first learns what 
strength there is in his imperial arm, and what 
happiness or woe wait upon his voice. So there 
must be a time when the vista of the future, 
with all its possibilities of glory and of shame, 
first opens upon the vision of youth. Then 
is he summoned to make his choice between 
truth and treachery ; between honor and dis- 
honor ; between purity and profligacy ; between 
moral life and moral death . And as he doubts or 
balances between the heavenward and the hell- 
ward course ; as he struggles to rise or consents 
to fall; is there, in all the universe of God, a 
spectacle of higher exultation or of deeper pa- 
thos ! Within him are the appetites of a brute 
and the attributes of an angel ; and when these 
meet in council to make up the roll of his des- 
tiny and seal his fate, shall the beast hound out 
the seraph ! Shall the young man, now con- 
scious of the largeness of his sphere and of the 
sovereignty of his choice, wed the low ambitions 
of the world, and seek, with their emptiness, to 
fill his immortal desires ? Because he has a few 
animal wants that must be supplied, shall he 



42 Timi «.iii- fob a roi kg MAN. 

become all animal, — an epicure and an ine- 
briate, — and blasphemously make it the firsl 
doctrine of his catechism, — "the Chief End 
of Man/' — to glorify his stomach and to enjoy 
U9 Because it is the law of self-preservation 
that he Bhall provide for himself, and the law 
of religion thai he shall provide for his family 
when he has one, musl he, therefore, cu1 away 
all the bonds of humanity thai bind him to 
his race, forswear charity, crush down every 
prompting of benevolence, and if he can have 
the palace and the equipage of a prince, and the 
table of a Sybarite, become a blind man, and a 
deaf man, and a dumb man, when lie walks the 
streets where hunger moans and nakedness 
shivers? Because he must earn his bread by 
the -weal of his brow, must lie, therefore, be- 
come a devotee of Mammon, and worship the 
meanest god that dwell- in Erebus ? Because he 
has an instinct lor the approval of hi- fellow- 
men, and would aspire to the honors <>f office, 
shall he, therefore, supple his principle- so that 
they may take the Protean shape of every pop- 
ular clamor: or poise his -out on what the 
mechanicians call a universal joint, which turns 
in every direction with indiscriminate facility? 
Because absurd notion-, descending to us from 

the worst and the weakest of men, have cre- 
ated factitious distinctions he t ween employ- 
ment-, shall he seek a sphere of life for which 



THOUGHTS FOK A YOUNG MAN. 43 

he is neither fitted by nature nor by culture, 
and spoil a good cobbler by becoming a poor 
lawyer ; or commit the double injustice of rob- 
bing the mountain goats of a herdsman to make 
a faithless shepherd in the Lord's pastures? 
Let the. young man remember there is nothing 
derogatory in any employment which ministers 
to the well-being of the race. It is the spirit 
that is carried into an employment that elevates 
or degrades it. The ploughman that turns the 
clod may be a Cineinnatus or a Washington, or 
he may be brother to the clod he turns. It is 
every way creditable to handle the yard-stick 
and to measure tape ; the only discredit con- 
sists in having a soul whose range of thought is 
as short as the stick and as narrow as the tape. 
There is no glory in the act of affixing a signa- 
ture by which the treasures of commerce are 
transferred, or treaties between nations are rat- 
ified ; the glory consists in the rectitude of the 
purpose that approves the one, and the gran- 
deur of the philanthropy that sanctifies the other. 
The time is soon coming, when, by the common 
consent of mankind, it will be esteemed more 
honorable to have been John Pounds, putting 
new and beautiful souls into the ragged chil- 
dren of the neighborhood, while he mended 
their father's shoes, than to have sat upon the 
British throne. The time now is, when, if 
Queen Victoria, in one of her magnificent ' ' Prog- 



1 I TH< T( >UNG MAN. 

rosses* through her realms, were to meet that 
more than American queen, Miss Dix, in her 
u circumnavigation of charity " among the in- 
e, the former should kneel and kiss the hand 
of the latter; mum the ruler over inert 1 than :i 
hundred million- of people should pay homage 
to the angel whom God has sent to the maniac. 

No matter whal may be the fortunes or the 
expectations of a young man, he has no righl 
1o live a life of idleness. In a world so full as 
this of incitements to exertion and of rewards 
for achievement, idleness is the most absurd of 
absurdities and the most shameful of shames. 
In such a world as ours, the idle man is nol so 
much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth 
which breeds idleness, — of which the English 
peerage is an examples and of which we are be- 
ginning to abound in specimens in this conn- 
try, — is only a sort of human oyster-bed, where 
heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a con- 
temptible life of slothfulness in growing plump 
and succulent for the grave-worm's banquet. 

The examples of Dr. Franklin, Dr. Bowditch 
and others, show thai the most laborious of 
men may find leisure, or make it, for the cult- 
ure of the mind. Indeed, it may almost be 
said thai one of the greatest obstacles to this 
culture consists in the number and variety of 
it- forms : for these are so many and so attract- 
ive thai thev bewilder rather than stimulate. 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 45 

The Fine Arts are so captivating and delightful 
that it is dangerous to recommend them. They 
so enchant the faculties of which they take pos- 
session, that they often arrest their votaries in 
a course of usefulness, and withdraw them from 
the performance of life's most urgent duties. 
But a taste for the beauties of nature should be 
cultivated by all. In these there is nothing 
corrupting or meretricious ; but all is health- 
ful and improving. Yet this love of nature is 
strangely neglected. Why is it that so many 
men commit to memory the commonplaces of 
art, and profess to admire a few square feet of 
canvas in parlor or in gallery, while they are 
impassive to all the garniture which God hangs 
around the horizon every day ; and which, as 
a token of his exhaustless fulness, He removes 
and renews with every passing hour? It is 
hard to sympathize, even with those of the more 
beautiful sex, who go into raptures over a sun- 
rise painted by a human hand, but who never 
saw an original. But where a love of natural 
beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes 
a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form 
and in coloring to the choicest collections of hu- 
man art, as the heavens are broader and loftier 
than the Louvre or the Vatican . The beauties of 
the earth and the sky, of the changing seasons, 
and of day and night, cannot be monopolized by 
one street in a city, or by one building in a 



L6 THOUGHTfl FOB A rOUNG MAN. 

street ; they cannol be closed against those who 
have no! a golden passport for admission ; bul 
they are free and open to whomsoever 1 
have an eye and an imagination that have been 
first taught to enjoy them. 

The pleasures of literature may joyfully oc- 
cupy a portion of the time not demanded by 
business or by health. The pursuits of science 
are even more valuable and ennobling than the 
study of literature. Literature is mainly con- 
versant with the work- of man, while science 
deals with the work- of God; and the differ- 
ence in the subject-matter of the two indicates 
the difference in their relative value, and in the 
power and happiness they can respectively be- 
stow. A great portion of our literature is 
addressed to marvellousness, ideality, and those 

subordinate faculties that are brought into play 
by narrative, adventure and scenic represen- 
tation. By far the larger part of all histories, 
a great portion of epic poetry, and almost all 

martial poetry, tire addressed to the brutish 
propensities of combativeness and destructive- 
ness. But physical science addresses itself to 
the noble faculty of causality and the kindred 
members of its -roup, including the mathe- 
matical powers; and ethical science addresses 
itself both to causality and to conscientiousness, 
and seeks also the -acred -auction- of venera- 
tion for whatever it teaches. A vast propor- 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 47 

lion of our literature consists of what had been 
written, or is a reproduction of what had been 
written, before the truths of modern science 
were discovered ; before the idea that there is 
an order of nature, and a law of cause and effect, 
in the spiritual as well as in the natural world, 
had been received into the mind, and had 
modified its action ; and nothing can be more 
different than what the same genius would 
write, before being imbued with the spirit of 
science, and after being so imbued. All science 
may be invested with the charms of literature ; 
but in such case it does not cease to be science ; 
it only becomes science beautified. Hence the 
poet or the novelist may be scientific men, 
though they so rarely have been. Before the 
time of Lord Bacon, men invented laws for 
nature, instead of inquiring of nature, by what 
laws she wrought. Since his time, men have 
condescended to interrogate nature instead of 
dictating to her ; and already we have a physi- 
cal world as different from that known before 
he wrote, as we can imagine any two planets 
to be from each other. A vast proportion of 
the existing literature has as little relation to 
metaphysical truth, as the speculations of the 
schoolmen, before the time of Bacon, had to 
physical laws. It is not more true that Aris- 
totle and his followers invented laws for nature 
which she never owned, and explained her 



IS THOUGHTS FOB \ FOUNG M \N. 

phenomena on principles that never existed, 

than it is thai nio-t of those WOrkfl which 

call \\<>rk- of the imagination assume the exist- 
ence of spiritual laws such as the spirit of man 
never knew, and therefore produce results of 

action and character Mich as all experience re- 
pudiates, [fence it is, thai I would commend 
rtcience more than literature as an improver 
of the mind. Such a state of things needs not 
to be, and probably ere long will cease to be. 
Gall, Spurzheim and Combe, have done lor 
Metaphysics, or the science of mind, a- meat 
a work as Bacon did lor Physics, or the laws 
of matter. Already their labors are extensive- 
ly appreciated 5 they are producing greal im- 
provements and ameliorations in penal juris- 
prudence and prison discipline, in the treat- 
ment ^( the insane, in ethical philosophy, and 
in education , which lies at the bottom of all, — 
subjects, which, as it seems to me, can never 
be properly understood but in the lighl of their 
science. A- the science of zoology has hunted 
krakens, phoenixes, unicorns and vampires from 
the animal kingdom : as the science of astron- 
omy ha- -wept pestilential and war-portending 
comet-, and all the terrors and the follies of as- 
trology, from the sky : as a knowledge of chem- 
istry ha- made the notion of charm- and philters 
and universal remedies, and the philosopher's 
stone, ridiculous and contemptible; as an im- 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 49 

proved knowledge of the operations of nature 
around us has banished fairies and gnomes 
and ghosts and witches, and a belief in dreams 
and signs, from all respectable society ; and as 
a better knowledge of the true God has de- 
throned hundreds of thousands of false gods, 
and cast them into oblivion ; so will an analyt- 
ical knowledge of the faculties of the human 
mind, of their special functions and ends, and 
of their related objects in the world of matter 
and the world of spirit, sweep into forgetfulness 
four fifths of what is now called Literature. 
But there is no reason why literature should 
not hereafter be founded on science, have con- 
stant reference to its truths, and thus become 
its most delightful illustrator. 

One thing is certain. If men can love fic- 
tion, they can love science better. Men love 
fiction because they love wonder and excite- 
ment ; but nothing is more true than that truth 
is more wonderful than fiction. No invention 
of the imagination is so exciting as the revela- 
tions of science ; — provided only that the fac- 
ulties which comprehend the latter are as much 
developed as those which comprehend the for- 
mer. Amid the marvels which science is yet 
to unfold, the wonders of Aladdin's lamp will 
lose their splendor; and posterity will look 
back upon those whose imagination could be 
satisfied with the Arabian Nights, or stories of 



50 tiioi oHTfl fob a roi m man. 

Fairy-land, with as much pitj as we look upon 
the savage whose highest idea of regal adorn- 
ment can be satisfied with beads of glass and 
jewelry of tin. The tricks of the juggler, the 
craft of the sorcerer and the magician, will die 
out ; for the lovers of wonder will seek for the 

exhilaration- of no\ell\ and ama/cinent in the 

laboratory of the chemist, and in the lecture- 
room of the philosopher, where nature, inspired 
by God, work- miracles with fire and water, 
with attraction and repulsion, with lighl and 
lightning, — at once kindling devotion and dis- 
pensing knowledge. Here are opportunities 
where the young man may build himself n]>, 
day by day, into the likeness of the -real uni- 
verse in which he dwells, imitating it- strength 
as well as it- beauty, and aspiring to it- moral 
heights a- well as expanding his knowledge to 
its physical amplitude. 

Bui there is one pitfall of temptation, into 
which the young man of our play is in danger 
of falling, and into which the mercantile young 
man is in especial danger of falling. The gods 
of this world, the polytheism which ha- so 
Ion- - coexisted with Christianity, is fa-t dying 
out. Men are rapidly coming to the worship 
of one deity: — the only misfortune IS., that it 
LS neither the living nor the true one. They 

ify w( alth ; and while they mosl falsely trans- 

\ r their woi.-hi| i< an idol divinity, they most 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MANo 51 

faithfully fulfil the letter of the commandment, 
and love it with all their heart and soul and 
mind and strength. Were it currently reported 
and believed that the river of Jordan rolled 
over golden sands, or that the pool of Bethesda 
was surrounded by "Placers," the Christian 
would vie with the Jew for the rebuilding of 
Jerusalem; all ships would be "up" for Pal- 
estine instead of San Francisco ; and the Holy 
Land would be again inundated, — not by a 
host of God-worshipping, but of gold-worship- 
ping, Crusaders. 

Now I wage no war against wealth. I taint 
it with no vilifying breath. Wealth, so far as 
it consists in comfortable shelter and food and 
raiment for all mankind ; in competence for 
every bodily want, and in abundance for every 
mental and spiritual need, is so valuable, so 
precious, that if any earthly object could be 
worthy of idolatry, this might best be the idol. 
Wealth, as the means of refinement and embel- 
lishment; of education and culture, not only 
universal in its comprehension, but elevated in 
its character ; wealth, as the means of perfecting 
the arts and advancing the sciences, of discov- 
ering and diffusing truth, is a blessing we can- 
not adequately appreciate ; and God seems to 
have pronounced it to be so, when He made 
the earth and all the fulness thereof, — the ele- 
ments, the land and sea, and all that in then* 



52 THOUGHTS FOB \ 1 01 KG M IN. 

is, — convertible into it. Bui wealth as the 
means of an idle or a voluptuous life; wealth 
as the fosterer of pride and the petrifier of the 
human heart ; wealth as the iron rod with which 
to beal the poor into submission to its will, is 
all the curses of random concentrated into one. 
It is not more true, thai money represents all 
values, than thai it represents all vice-. 

In this country mosl young men are poor. 
Time is the rock from which they are to hew 
out their fortunes; and health, enterprise, and 
integrity, the instruments with which to do it. 
To tlic young man without patrimony, there 
are few higher earthly duties than to obtain a 
competency. For this, diligence in business, 
absl inencein pleasures, privation even, of every- 
thing thai does not endanger health, are to be 
joyfully welcomed and home. When we look 
around us, and see how much of the wicked- 
ness of the world springs from poverty, it seems 
fco sanctify all honesl efforts for the acquisition 
of an independence, Bui when an indepen- 
dence is acquired, then come- the moral crisis, 
-—then comes an Ithuriel test. — which shows 
whether a man is higher than a common man, 
or lower than a common reptile. Tn the duty 
of accumulation, (and I call it a duty, in the 
mosl si rid and literal signification of that word,) 
all below a competence is mosl valuable, and its 
acquisition mosl laudable. Bu1 all above a 



THOUGHTS FOll A YOUNG MAN. 53 

fortune is a misfortune. It is a misfortune to 
him who amasses it ; for it is a voluntary con- 
tinuance in the harness of a beast of burden, 
when the soul should enfranchise and lift itself 
up into a higher region of pursuits and pleasures. 
It is a persistence in the work of providing goods 
for the body, after the body has already been 
provided for ; and it is a denial of the higher 
demands of the soul, after the time has arrived 
and the means are possessed of fulfilling those 
demands. Since men have bodies and heads 
and hearts to be provided for, some provision for 
the body is the duty first in order ; because the 
body is the only earthly residence for the mind, 
and therefore must first be taken care of; but 
when this first duty is amply fulfilled, then the 
other duties, — those which belong to the head 
and the heart, — become first, both in order and 
in importance. Because the lower service was 
once necessary, and has, therefore, been per- 
formed, it is a mighty wrong, when, without 
being longer necessary, it usurps the sacred 
rights of the higher. 

Great wealth is a misfortune, because it makes 
generosity impossible. There can be no gener- 
osity where there is no sacrifice ; and a man who 
is worth a million of dollars, though he gives 
half of it away, no more makes a sacrifice, than 9 
(if I may make such a supposition,) a dropsi- 
cal man, whose skin holds a hogshead of water. 



5 1 THOUGHTS FOB \ I « >UNG M w. 

makes a sacrifice when be is tapped for a barrel. 
Be is in a healthier condition after the opera- 
tion than before it. [fa « Ion key would be con- 
sidered a fool among donkeys, for desiring 
to double the burden of gold thai is already 
breaking bis back, I see not why the shorter- 
eared variety should be judged by a different 
rule. The literal declaration that it is easier for 
a camel to go through the eye of a needle than 
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of 
heaven, not only stands upon sacred authority, 
bul is confirmed by all human reasoning. For, 
what kingdom of heaven can there possibly be, 
from which love and -vmpathy, and the tender- 
ness of :i common brotherhood, are excluded? 
and the man who hoards superfluous wealth 
while there i- famishing in the next street : the 
man who revels in luxuries while the houseless 
and breadless are driven from his door; the 

man who, through an ostentation of literature, 

wall- himself in with libraries which he cannot 
read, while thousands of children around him 
are destitute even of school-books, — the very 
seed-wheat of all knowledge; — uch a man lias 
no love, nor sympathy, nor feeling of brother- 
hood, for hi- race ; and, therefore', go where lie 
will, the kingdom of heaven nm-t he hi- anti- 
pode. One point in the circumference of a re- 
volving wheel may a- well attempt to overtake 

the opposite point, a- he to reaeh that kingdom. 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 55 

The casting off* of his loved burdens will alone 
give him the agility to attain it. 

All above a fortune is usually the greatest of 
misfortunes to children. By taking away the 
stimulus to effort, and, especially, by taking 
away the restraints from indulgence, it takes 
the muscles out of the limbs, the brain out of the 
head, and virtue out of the heart. The same 
young man, who, with a moderate fortune, 
mio'ht retain the full vigor of his system till 
sixty, and be a blessing to the world all his life 
long, under the depraving influence of a vast 
patrimony, is likely to die a sot or a debauchee 
at forty-five, if he does not shoot himself as a 
non-compos at thirty. The father may feel 
proud of his twenty per cent, or thirty per cent, 
stocks ; but when the devil clutches the son 
for guiltily spending w T hat he clutched the fa- 
ther for guiltily amassing, he surely proves 
himself the better financier ; for he doubles his 
capital by a single speculation. Universal ex- 
perience shows that the inheritor of a penny 
has a better chance for success in life than the 
inheritor of a "plum." But better far than 
either is the golden mean of Agur's perfect 
prayer.* 

*The following anecdote, which I believe to be authentic, is related 
of the late Stephen Girard. Meeting a wealthy and active business 
man, he accosted him thus : *' Mr. A., I am surprised that a man having 
so much property as yourself should be so anxious to increase it."— 
"You cannot be so much surprised at my course," retorted his friend, 
"as I am at your remark, coming as it does from a man who has a much 
greater fortune than I have, and seems much more desirous to enlarge 
it. "Oh, yes," said Mr. Girard, " but you forget that I have no chil- 
dren to be spoiled by it." 



56 tiioi QHT8 fob \ roi SQ m \N. 

Vast fortunes are a misfortune to the State. 
They confer irresponsible power; and human 
nature, except in the rarest Instances, has proved 
incapable of wielding irresponsible power, with- 
out abuse. The feudalism of Capital is nol a 
whit less formidable than the feudalism of Force. 
Tin' millionaire is as dangerous to the welfare 
of the community, in our day, as was the baro- 
nial lord of the Middle Ages. Both supply the 
means of shelter and of raiment on the Bame 
conditions ; both hold their retainers in service 
by the same tenure, — their necessity for bread ; 
both use their superiority to keep themselves 
superior. The power of money is as imperial 
as the power of the sword ; and 1 may as well 
depend upon another for my head as for my 
bread. The day is sure to come when men 
will look bach upon the prerogatives of Capi- 
tal, at the present time, with as severe and as 
just a condemnation as we now look hack upon 
the predatory Chieftains of the Dark Ag 
Weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, or 
even in the clumsy scales of human justice, 
there is no equity in the allotments which as- 
sign to one man hut a dollar a day, with w ork- 
ing, while another has an income of a dollar a 
minute, without working. Under the reign of 
Force, or under the reign of Money, there may 
be here and there a good man who uses his 
power for blessing and not for oppressing his 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 57 

race ; but all their natural tendencies are ex- 
clusively bad. In England, we see the feudal- 
ism of Capital approaching its catastrophe. In 
Ireland we see the catastrophe consummated. 
Unhappy Ireland ! where the objects of human 
existence and the purpose of human govern- 
ment have all been* reversed ; where rulers, for 
centuries, have ruled for the aggrandizement of 
themselves, and not for the happiness of their 
subjects ; where misgovernment has reigned so 
long, so supremely, and so atrociously, that, at 
the present time, the "Three Estates " of the 
realm are Crime, Famine and Death ! 

But in speaking of the criminality of hoard- 
ing vast wealth, whether to gratify acquisitive- 
ness or to maintain family pride, regardless of 
the suffering it might relieve, the vice it might 
reclaim, the ignorance it might instruct, or the 

7 o C 7 

positive happiness which, in a thousand ways, 
it might create, one grand exception should be 
made. Perhaps you have demanded that this 
exception should be intimated, at an earlier 
point ; but I have reserved it to the present 
time, in order to give it a distinct enunciation, 
and to do it ample justice. Like every other 
act, the right or wrong of amassing property 
depends upon the motive that prompts it. If a 
man labors for accumulation all his life long, 
neglecting the common objects of charity, and 
repulsing the daily appeals to his benevolence, 



tiimi < !i i Jj FOB \ YOl \<- m \.\. 

iml with the setl led, determinate purpo 
multiply ing bis resources that, at death, he can 
proi ide for some magnificent scheme of philan- 
thropy, for which smaller sums or daily contri- 
butions would be insufficient, then he becomes 
:i self-constituted Bervant and almoner of the 
Lord, putting bis mast ir^s tplenl ou1 at usury, 
but rendering back both talent and usury, on 
the day of account; and who shall say thai 
such a man is not a jusl and faithful steward, 
and worthy of his reward? Bui the day is sure 
to conic which will test the spirit thai hi 
erned the life, ( )n thai day, it will be revealed, 
whether the man o\' vosi wealth, like Stephen 
Girard, has welcomed toil, endured privation, 
borne contumely, while in his lecret hear! he 
was nursing the mighty purpose of opening a 
fountain of blessedness so copious and exhaust- 
less thai it would Bow on undiminished to the end 
of time : or whether, like John Jacob Astor, he 
was hoarding wealth for the base love of wealth, 
hugging to his breasl , in his dying hour, the mem- 
ory of his gold and not of his Redeemer; griping 
bis riches till the scythe of death cut off his hands, 
and he was changed, in the twinkling of an eye, 
from being one of the richesl men thai ever 
lived in this world, to being one of the poorest 
souls that ever went out of it.* 

* I make tin* i personal motive n dat- 

um* 
t Mm "topolnl 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 59 

The translators of the Gospel tell us that 
Dices is not a proper but a common name. 
Any one, therefore, who revels in superfluous 
wealth while living, or bequeaths injurious cof- 
fers to his children when dying, while he forgets 
the poor,, the vicious and the ignorant, is Dives ; 
and before he makes any more pecuniary in- 
vestments, he is respectfully commended to the 
sequel of the parable ! 

Some metaphysicians have resolved the love 
of money into the love of power. But surely 
no adult man whose heart is not all eaten out 
by avarice, surely no young man, can prefer 
the brute power of money before the moral 
power of character,— fear and passive submis- 
sion before homage and willing obedience. 
Once, in familiar conversation with a very 
rich man, I asked him by what motive he had 
been prompted, in accumulating his wealth. 
" Power," said he, " power ; "and then, clench- 
ing his hands and teeth, and contracting all his 
muscles to their highest tension, he added, "I 
wanted power, and I have got it." — "Yes," 

him tohave been the most notorious, the most wealthy, and, considering 
his vast means, the most miserly, of his class, in this country. Nothing but 
absolute insanity can be pleaded in palliation of the conduct of a man 
who was worth nearly or quite twenty millions of dollars,but gave only 
some half million, or less than a half million, of it for any public object. 
If men of such vast means will not benefit the world by their example 
while they live, we have a right to make reprisals for their neglect, by 
using them as a warning after they are dead. In the midst of so much 
poverty and suffering as the world experiences, it has become a high 
moral and religious duty to create an overwhelming public opinion against 
both the parsimonies and the squanderings of wealth. 



60 THOl OHT8 FOB I TO\ KG M \N. 

Baid [, "you have power over any quantity of 
water or steam, and over any number of wheels. 
Ymu have power, too, over the bodies of certain 
classes of men ; bid do good with your wealth, 
and yon will become a ruler over ;ill nn 
In arts : nor will your reign cease when you die, 
hut will last as long as yon are remembered; 
and the love of men will nol suffer your memory 
to perish." 

It cannol be necessary here to give any for- 
mal answer to the inquiries, WTio shall deter- 
mine, or what amount shall determine, the line 
of demarcation between a sufficiency and a su- 
perfluity of wealth; or to show the unsound- 
ness of the common definition, thai %i Enough" 
is always a little more than a man has. That 
there is such a line of demarcation, no man 
doubts; jus! as there is a distinction between 
penuriousness and liberality, or between acces- 
saries and luxuries', though it may not be prac- 
ticablej in all cases, to say what lies upon one 
side of thai line and what upon the other. Lei 
the man who is ambitious of wealth acquire and 
possess, uncensured, all thai any Christian man 

would allow : and, to avoid all controversy, lei 

a small margin be given him besides. I- nol 
tin- sufficiently liberal ? 

Now, the greal moral which I would draw 
from all this is, thai amid the obstacles to a 
sufficiency and the temptation- to a super- 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 61 

Unity of wealth, the young man should pre- 
pare himself for all the struggles of the too 
little, and against all the seductions of the too 
much. And however covetable a prize he may 
suppose wealth to be, let him never forget that 
honesty is a prize infinitely more covetable. 
However formidable the evils of want and pov- 
erty, of hunger and nakedness, of homeless- 
ness and starvation, let the eternal truth for- 
ever blaze before his eyes, that fraud, falsehood, 
and overreaching, are evils infinitely greater. 
If God has not given you the power to be rich, 
with perfect integrity and uprightness, then He 
never meantr that you should be rich ; and it 
requires but very little of philosophy or of relig- 
ion to say, you had better submit to His will, 
" lest haply you be found to fight against God." 
If you cannot live by perfect honesty, then 
starvation becomes more honorable than any 
martyrdom by fire. Does strict veracity, — 
a punctilious regard for your word, — require 
you to lose a cargo, or a California, think you 
that the Infinite Creator and Possessor of all 
things has not something better wherewith to 
requite your loss, than if every article in all 
your invoices were a cargo of India's riches, 
and every item in all your inventories were a 
California of washed and winnowed gold ? Go 
out at night and look up into the starry hea- 
vens, and behold the " wealth of glory" with 



62 i HOI GHTfl i OK a FOUNG M \\. 

which thej are stored. Cannot Be \\ ho spread 
cut this golden canopy, — cannot He who, if all 
these -iin- were swepl into annihilation, could 
rekindle their fires by a thought, — cannof He 
reward you for being honest? Cannol the 
Maker of all these worlds, and the Owner of 
all these worlds, requite you, though von should 
lose a kingdom, or a continent, for His sake? 
Honor, to a merchant, is whal valor is to b 
soldier, or charity to a Christian. It' there 
ninM be lying and cogging and false pretences, 
Id the dandy practise them; for it has been 
doubted whether he has a soul. From the 
barbarian and the heathen, knavery may be 
expected; tor they have not the lighl of civili- 
zation, nor the Divine morality of the Gospel. 
Bui compared with the merchant who effects 
insurance upon property already losl , or smug- 
gles goods, <>r gambles in stocks, the beggar 
that hires a babe and blisters it- body into 
sores, in order to excite the compassion and 
extort the charity of the benevolent, i- an hon- 
orable man. The man who sells one thing for 
another, or less tor more, or an interior tor a 
superior quality, though lie may enter a large 
item on the " Profit" side of his earthly leger; 

yet, in the Book of Life, he will find it entered 

on the Bide of lk Loss/ 1 I- there a young man 

in this city, who de-ire- ii) he enumerated, in 
the moral census, a- a rascal subject of that 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 63 

rascal kingdom of whicli Hudson, the "rail- 
way king/ 9 is the rascal sovereign? What 
are palaces and equipages, what though a man 
could cover a continent with his title-deeds, or 
an ocean with his commerce, compared with 
conscious rectitude ; with a face that never 
turns pale at the accuser's voice ; with a bosom 
that never throbs at the fear of exposure ; with 
a heart that might be turned inside out, and dis- 
cover no stain of dishonor? To have done no 
man a wrong ; to have put your signature to 
no paper to which the purest angel in heaven 
might not have been an attesting witness ; to 
walk and live, unseduced, within arm's length 
of what is not your own, with nothing between 
your desire and its gratification but the invisi- 
ble law of rectitude ; — this is to be a man ; 
this is to be a child of God. He who cannot 
resist temptation is not a man. He is wanting 
in the highest attributes of humanity. The 
honor and nobleness of the old " knight-errant- 
ry" consisted in defending the innocence of 
men and protecting the chastity of women 
against the assaults of others. But the truer 
and nobler knighthood protects the property 
and the character, the innocence and the chas- 
tity, of others, against one's self. 

Whoever yields to temptation debases him- 
self with a debasement from which he can 
never arise. This,- indeed, is the calamity of 



6 1 THOUGHTS FOB A TOUNG MAH. 

calamities, the bitterest dreg in the cup of 
bitterness. Every unrighteous act tells with :i 
thousand fold more force upon the actor than 
upon the sufferer. The false man is more 
false to himself than to any one else, lie 
may despoil oilier-, but himself is the chief 
loser. The world's scorn he might sometimes 
forget, bul the knowledge of his own perfidy 
is undying. The fire of guilty passions may 
tormenl whatever lies within the circle of its 
radiations; but fire is always hottest at the 
centre, and lliat centre is the profligate's own 
heart. A man can be wronged and live; but 
the unresisted, unchecked impulse to do wn 
is the first and the second death. The moment 
any one of the glorious faculties with which 
God has endowed us i> abused or misused, that 
faculty loses, forever, a portion of its delicacy 
and it- energy. Physiology teaches us that 
all privation and all violence suffered by our 
physical system, before birth, impairs the very 
stamina of our constitution, and sends US into 
this world, so far shorn of the energies, and 
blunted in the fineness of the perceptions, we 
should otherwise possess. So every injury 
which we inflict upon our moral nature, in this 
life, musl dull, forever and ever, our keen 
capacities of enjoyment, though in the midst of 
infinite bliss, and weaken our power of ascen- 
sion, where virtuous spirits are ever ascending. 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUXG MAN. 65 

It must send us forward into the next stage of 
existence maimed and crippled, so that how- 
ever high we may soar, our flight will always 
be less lofty than it would otherwise have been, 
and however exquisite our bliss, it will always 
be less exquisitely blissful than it was capable 
of being. Every instance of violated conscience, 
like every broken string in a harp, will limit 
the compass of its music, and mar its harmo- 
nies forever. Tremble, then, and forbear, oh 
man ! when thou wouldst forget the dignity of 
thy nature and the immortal glories of thy des- 
tiny ; for if thou dost cast down thine eyes to 
look with complacency upon the tempter, or 
bend thine ear to listen to his seductions, thou 
dost doom thyself to move forever and ever 
through inferior spheres of being ; thou dost 
wound and dim the very organ, with which 
alone thou canst behold the splendors of eter- 
nity ! 

In all business transactions, let Justice be the 
pole-star. Without justice, the foundations of 
private character and the foundations of the 
state are, alike, rottenness. The old adage, 
" Fiat justitia^ mat coelwn" — " Let justice be 
done though the heavens fall, " is founded upon 
a supposition which truth pronounces impossi- 
ble. The more you do justice, the more the 
heavens will not fall ; the stronger will their 
foundations stand ; and the higher will the su- 



66 THOUGHTS FOB A TOUNG man. 

pe retru c tu re rise into realms of parity and bliss, 
[njustice alone can Bhake down the pillars of 
the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and 
lit. 
Bui though the Prophel of our age would ad- 
dress the acquisitiveness of young men in the 
language of restrainl and warning, yet. with an 
energy and fervor like thai of the Prophets of 
old, he promises them immortal reward- for 
every deed of philanthropy, for every aspira- 
tion after Human Brotherhood. The world is 
entering upon a new moral cycle. The horrid 
reign of War and Conquesl is drawing to its ig- 
nominious close. That domination of wealth, 
also, which has crushed the head and imbruted 
the heart of the millions, in order to subject 
their bodies to unresisting and unremitting toil, 
will soon share both the dethronement and the 
infamy of that sovereign Brute, called Force, 
whose place it has supplied. The discoveries 
ience and the pro f philosophy hai e 

mlarged and dignified the dialect of the priesl 
and the moralist, that their brother of the old 
monastery or conclave could now hardly under- 
stand them. Nineteen twentieths of all that 
Was held to l>e knowledge, in the time of the 

Bchoolmen, is known to he folly now : nineteen 

twentieth- of all thai a Free State hold- ti) he 
patriotism now, was -edition or high treason 
four centuries ago : and nineteen twentieth.- < i 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 67 

all that the church holds to be religion now, 
was infidelity or atheism then. Men have 
made the great discovery that Ethics and The- 
ology, though founded upon unchangeable 
truths, are still progressive sciences, not less 
than Physiology or Geology. Under the sub- 
lime law of progress, the present outgrows the 
past. The great heart of humanity is heaving 
with the hopes of a brighter day. All the 
higher instincts of our nature prophesy its ap- 
proach ; and the best intellects of the race are 
struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment. 
Thoughts of Freedom, Duty, Benevolence, 
Equality, and Human Brotherhood, agitate the 
nations ; and neither the Pope with his Cardi- 
nals, nor the Czar with his Cossacks, can re- 
press them. Were these thoughts imprisoned 
in the centre of the earth, they would burst its 
granite folds, speed onward in their career, 
and fulfil their destiny. They are imbued with 
a deathless vigor. They must prevail, or the 
idea of a Moral Governor of the universe is an 
imposture, and the divine truths of the Gospel 
a fable. Here, then, is opened a new and noble 
career for the ambition of emulous youth ; — 
not the ambition for subduing men into slaves, 
but the holy ambition of elevating them into 
peers ; not for usurping principality or king- 
dom, but for building himself up into princi- 
pality and kingdom ; not merely for gathering 



Tin FOB \ Ti >UNG M \n. 

it were, star by star, to be \\ o\ en 
into a glittering robe for his person, or to trn 
a crow i) of glory for lii- head j but to expand 
his ow d bou] into grander proporl ions, I 
it angelic and archangelic loftiness of stature, 
and to till it perpetually with thai song of ]<>y 
which even the morning stars could not but 

t when they beheld the splendor of the ( rod- 
I reflected from the new creation. Ii 
are opportunities, means, incitements, through 
which the young man may build himself up 

re and more into a likeness of the universe 
in which he dwell-, and configure himself more 
and more to tin* Infinite Perfection thai goi i 
it. 

In a universe like this, where tin 4 primary 
and fundamental relation, — the basis of all other 
relations, — is thai which exists between the 
creature and the Creator, this fad must be 
eternally true : — Whatever direction the genius 
ami energy of tin 4 creature may take, whether 
it be right or wrong, in that direction new dis- 
3 will be made, new forms ofgoodorof 
evil will be unfolded to view. In a physical 
and in a 8] iritual sense, the universe around us 
is full; and, as we cannot go beyond the cir- 
cumference of presenl physical discoveries \\ ith- 
out discovering new theatres ^\' being, so we 
cam u'yond the circumference of existing 

spiritual relations without finding new spiritual 



THOUGHTS FOli A YOUNG MAN. 69 

relations. Columbus was devoted to the study 
of geography. As the result of that study, he 
felt that there was a continent to be discovered ; 
and he discovered it. The mind of Newton 
pondered on astronomical truths. His contem- 
plations engendered the belief that some cohe- 
sive principle bound together the worlds on 
high ; and he demonstrated the law of gravita- 
tion. Washington was a patriot. He yearned 
for liberty ; and by his valor and his wisdom 
our republic was established. So new moral 
blessings and beauties are certain to reward the 
efforts of new moral power, whatever direction 
that power may take. Grander discoveries 
than any which have yet been made, — revela- 
tions that lay beyond the ken of Bacon's far- 
seeing vision, and beauties that shone outside 
the imagination of the vast-minded Shakespeare, 
— await the evoking power of philanthropic 
genius. Benevolence is a world of itself, — a 
world which mankind, as yet, have hardly be- 
gun to explore. We have, as it were, only 
skirted along its coasts for a few leagues, with- 
out penetrating the recesses, or gathering the 
riches of its vast interior. Hostile nations and 
repugnant races of men are wayward and devi- 
ous orbs, yet to be brought into a system of 
Brotherhood by the attractions of Love. Jus- 
tice, honor, love, truth, are the corner-stones 
of the holy government which is yet to be or- 



7 I l li< »! «.ni - FOB \ roi N <- M iS. 

iized upon earth. For all true-hearted ad- 
venturers into these new realms of enterprise! 
there are moral Edena to be planted, such as 
Milton with lii- celestial verse could never de- 
scribe : and there are heights of moral sublim- 
ity to be attained, such as Etosse with his 1 <-l< - 
-cope could never descry. 

Glowing with a vivid conception of these 
truths, so wonderful and so indisputable, le1 
me ask, whether, among all the spectacles which 
earth presents, and which angels mighl look 
down upon with an ectasy too deep for utter- 
ance, is there one fairer and more enrapturing 
to the Bighl than that of a young man, jusl fresh 
from tin 4 Creator's hands, and with the unspent 
energies of the coming eternity wrapped up in 
his bosom, surveying and recounting, in the 
solitude of his closet or in the darkness of mid- 
night, the mighty gifts with which he has been 
endowed, and the magnificent career of useful- 
ness and of blessedness which has been opened 
before him: and resolving, with one all-eon- 
centrating and all-hallowing vow, that he will 
Jive, true to the noblest capacities of his being, 
and in obedience to thi highest law of his na- 
ture! [f aughl can be nobler or sublimer than 
this, it is i!m i life thai fulfils the vow. Such a 
young man reverences the divine skill and wis- 
dom by which his physical frame has been so 

fearfully and wonderfully made ; and lie keeps 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 71 

it pure and clean, as a fit temple for the living 
God. For every indulgence of appetite that 
would enervate the body, or dull the keen sense, 
or cloud the luminous brain, he has a " Get thee 
behind me !" so stern and deep, that the balked 
Satans of tempatation slink from before him, 
in shame and despair. If obliged to earn his 
bread by the sweat of his brow, or by the sweat 
of his brain, he is "not slothful in business." 
Fired with energy himself, he energizes al] 
around him. He is a Leyden jar always charged 
to a plenum ; and whenever he comes in con- 
tact with dead things, or lifeless men, he emits 
a spark so potent that they are electrized into 
celerity. Holding punctuality among the ma- 
jor virtues, he is ever true to the appointed 
place and hour ; and as he goes and comes, men 
set their watches by him, as though he were a 
clock-face of the sun, and moved by solar ma- 
chinery. In selecting his vocation for a liveli- 
hood, he abjures every occupation, and every 
profession, however lucrative they may be, or 
however honorable they may be falsely deemed, 
if, with his own weal, they do not also promote 
the common weal ; and he views the idea with 
a deep religious abhorrence, that anything can 
advance the well-being of himself which in- 
volves the ^7?-being of others. However mea- 
gre his stock in trade, if he engages in business, 
he will not seek to enlarge it by entering Con- 



i Z 1 IP »i GH1 - FOB \ rOl SQ M w. 

science and Honor in hia books under the h< 
of " merchandise j " aor will he begin the sale 
of goods to customers, by selling his soul to 
Satan, [f he ei er \ entures to emhui k on < 
perilous sea of politic,-, he Bteers his course by 
the eternal light in the tkies; and not by the 
Will-o -the-wisps, or by any meteor glare, which 
popular fermentation, or party heats, may en- 
gender. He labors earnestly for all the m< uns 
of health, comfort, and improvement, bul 
the parade and the ostentations i f wealth ; sh 
pomp and poverty with equal solicitude; and, 
in a figurative, if not in a literal sense, he avoids 
those Streets in cur cities where cholera ]•: 

and fevers consume, and also those other sti « 
of Fashion and Pride, where the prevailing ep- 
idemic is an ossification of the heart. Holding 
an affectation of saintliness to he the worst of 

wickedness, he doe- not, like Pilate, take water 
and wash his hand-, when about to consum- 
mate a deed that blackens and defile- his BOul. 

The locks and holts and bars, by which men 
seek to -rcure their property, have no relation 
to him ; for, tin 1 nearer he is brought into con- 
tact with another'- goods or gold, the more he 

is tilled with an opposite polarity : and a far- 
thing, a mill, an infinitesimal, of another man's 

wealth, would burn his palm- with BO fiett 
heat, that red-hot halls would he more tolera- 
ble. The honor of man is holy, the chastity 



THOUGHTS FOR A 1TOTJNG MAN. 73 

of woman is thrice holy, in his keeping. When 
he has acquired that golden mean of property 
which carries its possessor out of the tempta- 
tions of want, without carrying him into the 
temptations of wealth ; and which, as a patri- 
mony for his children, will nourish and not 
blast the vigor that is in them, — he leaves the 
money-making treadmill, and betakes himself 
to some walk of public usefulness most congen- 
ial to his taste ; — either to adorn literature by 
his genius, or to advance science by his studies, 
or to organize charities for supplying the pri- 
vations of sense, or relieving the loss of sanity, 
or to combine and strengthen the conservative 
and progressive forces of civilization ; or to 
combat, hand to hand, with some of those ter- 
rific monsters that infest societ} 7 , — ignorance, 
bigotry, intemperance, slavery, or war, — which 
need some hunter mightier than Nimrod for 
their extirpation. Or, if he still continues to 
gather in the golden harvests of wealth, he opens 
a set of books with heaven, becoming the Lord's 
steward for men's redemption from suffering 
and crime, and laying up his treasures where 
moth, nor rust, nor thieves can approach them. 
He is so passionate a lover of the Fine Arts, 
that he discovers diviner forms of beauty, and 
more celestial harmonies of coloring, than mor- 
tal sculptor or painter ever dreamed of. Not 
a cultured imagination alone, but reason, con- 



7 1 ill' >i 0HT8 FOB a rOUNG man. 

science, religion, all have taught him that the 
finest and most elegant of all the arts, earthly 
or supernal, is to paint smiles and ruby joys 
upon the wan cheek of suffering infancy; to 
quench the demon-fire of passion that bla 
from the eye of precocious wantonness, and 
kindle in it- stead the serene light that radiates 
from a fount of inward purity ; to hang round 
and preOccupy the chambers of the juvenile 
mind with all types and images of lovelii 
and excellence, and to build up all the glori 
faculties of t lie soul, as in colossal architecture, 
i«» -Mine nearer resemblance to the Divine ( >rig- 
inal. Reason, conscience, religion, all have 
taught him. that lie who crowd- the wall- of 
his own dwelling, or the city's ampler galleries, 
with the painting and statuary of all the great 
masters, while orphanage sinks to ruin around 
him, in default of Christian care, and while all 
the hideous images of depravity and shame are 
daily and hourly fn scoed into the souls of lost , 
abandoned childhood, only proves with what 
daubs and impostures and caricatures the walls 
of every mansion in his own soul arc covered. 
Reason, conscience, religion, all have taught 
him, that when the starving babe -hull no longer 
wail f<»r sustenance upon the starving mother's 
breast ; when blasphemy and obscenity shall 
no longer he the lullaby with which the intem- 
perate father or mother lulls infancy to sleep; 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 75 

when parental Avickedness shall no longer teach 
falsehood to the youthful tongue, and theft and 
violence to the youthful hand ; when the infinite 
woes and agonies of earth, which its superflu- 
ous wealth and its wasted time might so easily 
prevent, shall cease to be, — then may opulence 
and taste and leisure devote their time and 
means to galleries of art, and saloons of music, 
and halls of dancing and festivity, without enor- 
mous guilt. And while hypocrisy and phari- 
saical pride are infinitely loathsome to the young 
man of a true heart, yet he rejoices to be known, 
at all times and everywhere, as a religious man ; 
for, not less in the marts of business and the 
hilarities of social intercourse, than in the sanc- 
tuary or on the death-bed, he feels how infi- 
nitely unmanly it is to be ashamed of the no- 
blest and divinest attribute in all his nature. 
And when in the fulness of patriarchal years, 
crowned with clustering honors, and covered 
with the Beatitudes, as with a garment, he 
brings his heroic life to a triumphant close, the 
celestial light that bursts from the opened and 
welcoming gates of heaven, breaking upon his 
upturned countenance, is reflected into the paths 
of all surviving men; and the wings of his 
spirit, as it ascends, fan the earth with odors 
from the Upper Paradise. 

The Germans and French have a beautiful 
phrase, which would enrich any language that 



76 Timroirr- fob i TOl \«; max. 

raid adopt it. They say, k ' To orient; 99 or, 
4k to oru at i If n 

When a traveller arrives at a strange city, or 
is overtaken by night, or by a storm, he take- 
out his compass and learns which way is the 
Bast, or Orient. Forthwith all the cardinal 
point., — eagt, west, north, south, — take their 
true places in his mind, and he is in no danger 
of seeking for the sunsel or the pole-star in 
the wrong quarter of the heavens. He orients 
himself. 

When commanders of armies approach each 
other for the battle, on which the fate of empires 
may depend, each learns the localities of the 
ground, — how best he can intrench his front or 
cover his flank, how best he can make a sally 
or repel an assault. lie orient* himself 

When a statesman revolves some mighty 
scheme of administrative policy, so vast as to 
comprehend surrounding nation- and later times 
in its ample scope, he take- an inventory of his 
resources, he adapts mean- to ends, he adjusts 
plans and movement- so that one .-hall not coun- 
terwork another, and he marshals the whole 
rie- of affairs tor producing the grand result. 
orients himself. 

Young Man ! open your heart before me for 
one moment, and let me write upon it these 
parting word-. The gracious God ha- just 
called you into being ; and, during the few days 



THOUGHTS FOR A YOUNG MAN. 77 

you have lived, the greatest lesson you have 
learned is, that you shall never die. All around 
your body the earth lies open and free, and you 
can go where you will. All around your spirit, 
the universe lies open and free, and you can go 
where you will. Orient yourself! Orient 
yourself ! Seek frivolous and elusive pleas- 
ures if you will ; expend your immortal ener- 
gies upon ignoble and fallacious joys ; but know, 
their end is intellectual imbecility, and the per- 
ishing of every good that can ennoble or em- 
paradise the heart ! Obey, if j t ou will, the law 
of the baser passions, — appetite, pride, selfish- 
ness,— but know, they will scourge 3^011 into 
realms where the air is hot with fiery-tongued 
scorpions, that will sting and torment your 
soul into unutterable agonies ! But study and 
obey the sublime laws on which the frame of 
nature was constructed ; study and obey the 
sublimer laws on which the soul of man was 
formed ; and the fulness of the power and the 
wisdom and the blessedness, with which God 
has filled and lighted up this resplendent uni- 
verse, shall all be yours ! 



